The Selected Letters of Willa Cather edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

“The Selected Letters of Willa Cather” gives a rare view into the private world of the beloved author in a way that you can’t get from her books, or even biographies. Reading the letters is something like reading a diary. There are no bombshell shocks or scandals, but there is the detailed daily unfolding of her life, from her teenage years in Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the 1880s to her life in New York as a Pulitzer-prize winning author in the 1940s. She’d banned the publication of her personal correspondence in her will, but that ban was finally lifted in 2011 after the death of her nephew.

This new book, edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, has 564 letters – about 20 percent of the total – including letters written to childhood friends later in her life, which have some of her most revealing thoughts about aging and loss, to letters to luminaries like Yehudi Menuhin, a very close friend, Sinclair Lewis, and the president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, who loved her novels about Czech immigrants in America.

Cather fans get a rare opportunity to dig into the new terrain when Jewell comes to the Tattered Cover on May 6 to discuss “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.” An associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Jewell and co-editor Stout read and transcribed more than 3,000 letters before selecting those with the freshest insights. He is also editor of the “Willa Cather Archive” and a member of the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors.